Talkingapple's List: 107

• Apple announced Tuesday the best quarter in its corporate history where earnings rose more than 117% to $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share, on record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion.

• • Apple ended the quarter with $97.6 billion in cash, an increase of $16 billion from the previous quarter.
     
  • Oppenheimer said Apple executives are "actively discussing" potential uses for its massive cash hoard, but there are no specifics to share

  • he had to say something, I don't think their gonna be buying anything exciting, more of the small strategic companies. But I would love to say goodbye to Vodafone.
    Also, just wondering about factories...minimise leaks, and have no competition on the assembly line. 
    
    But that would increase prices. I doubt they could just get into china as an american company.
• 1.5 million iPads already in use in education.
• . Tablets already exceeded desktop PC sales in the U.S. last quarter, based on the latest data from IDC.
• More than 600,000 copies of iBooks Author have been downloaded since it was announced last week.
• 3 million downloads of the iTunes U application for iOS since last week.
• A favorable component environment led to high gross margins of 44 percent, even in the face of a hard drive shortage. Cook believes that favorable component environment will continue going into the next quarter.

  • best probably in the history of the company. Are you kidding? 44.7% on a hardware company. This is bonkers. And this at the heart of Apple's success. Great deals with component makers and inside development.
    Very hard to compete with that.
• iPhone unit sales were up 128 percent year over year, and revenue saw a 133 percent increase from the first fiscal quarter of 2011.

  • They now account for 8% of PHONE market. Apple only wanted 1%

  • In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined. The pattern continued.
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  • • bear in mind that this quarter in 2010/11 was not the release quarter for the iPhone 4.
• The iPad saw a 111 percent increase in unit sales from holiday 2010 to holiday 2011. Revenue from the iPad also saw a 99 percent increase year over year.

  • 15.4 M

  • Cook doesn't see "limited function" tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire being in the same category as the iPad. He said Amazon and others will probably sell a "fair number" of units, but people who want an iPad won't settle for the limited function.
• There is "clear" cannibalization of the Mac by the iPad. But he thinks that there's a lot more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad, which makes it a trend he's fine with.

  • Apple has surpassed HP in both computer unit sales and revenues for the first time, taking the top spot sooner than expected on record sales of iPads. Rather than losing sales to low priced tablets, Apple said it would "continue to innovate like crazy" in the tablet arena. 
    Sold more iPads than HP PCs.
• Mac desktop sales were up 21 percent year over year, while revenue saw a 12 percent increase.
   
   The MacBook lineup saw even more growth of 28 percent in unit sales, while revenue grew by 22 percent.

  • The originally reported dismal “PC” growth of -5.9% becomes an even more dismal -8.5% without Apple’s numbers propping it up. That -2.6% delta is not insignificant, it’s over 40% worse than what was reported.
• Apple TV is doing "very well," Cook said, with a bit above 2.8 million units sold last fiscal year. 1.4 million of those came in the most recent quarter.

  • sold some 4.2 million units since the release of this new one. 4.2 million of anything is a lot.
• iPod unit sales were down 21 percent year over year, with a 26 percent decline in revenue.

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• • Biggest thing here is the smartphone growth, more than 50% per quarter.
• Apple overtook Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2011 to grab the top spot among global smartphone makers, earning 23.9 percent of the market with sales of 37 million iPhones, according to one set of estimates.

• the company sold 200,000 Xoom and Xyboard tablets in the last quarter, which brought the yearly total to one million.

• Nokia Oyj saw a 73 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings, the company reported on Thursday. While Apple saw sales of 37 million iPhones in the holiday quarter, Nokia sold just 1 million of its new "Lumia" Windows Phones since it debuted in mid-November, according to Reuters.
• better than the market expected
• Japanese game maker Nintendo revealed on Thursday it expects to post its first full-year loss at an operating level in company history. Nintendo publicly revealed that it expects an annual operating loss of 45 billion yen, or $575 million U.S., which is significantly greater than analyst expectations of a 4.2 billion yen loss.

  • Just sell the stupid games.

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• RIM Chief Executive Thorsten Heins joined the company's chairman of the board, Barb Stymiest, in a conference call with investors on Monday morning
• Heins told analysts and investors that he is not pursuing strategic options for RIM like a sale of the company or a split
• Smartphones running BlackBerry 10 are expected to arrive in the second half of calendar 2012, a date some industry watchers believe may be too little, too late.

  • By then iPhone 5 and a bunch more things will be out.
    
    I think they really needed somebody from the outside. By saying he's not gonna change the products he's saying the problem is perception and marketing. He's probably right.
    
    Honestly, I think they have to either open their OS to licensing, or they will go away. You cannot survive without developers support.
    
    Look at the playbook, it's being sold in the UK for £180, and still it's not out of stock. Next month they will bring Android apps to the playbook...but is that enough.
    
    It's a good product, but a bad investment.

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• • After trying some of these new textbooks...it is much more appealing. Just the fact that you get a response from your textbook is a boost.
• A yearlong pilot program with digital textbooks on Apple's iPad found that students' algebra scores increased by 20 percent when compared to a curriculum with traditional books.
• Ameila Earhart Middle School in California's Riverside Unified School District.
• "HMH Fuse" application helped more than 78 percent of students score "Proficient" or "Advanced" on the spring 2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks.
• during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 school year, when students using "HMH Fuse" were said to have scored an average of 10 points higher than their peers. But that number jumped even higher for the California Standards Test in spring 2011, when "HMH Fuse" students scored about 20 percent higher than students who used traditional textbooks.

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• • I would say that is a good incentive to go and work for them, not just to keep employees.
• According to 9to5Mac, during today's town hall meeting, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced to employees that they would get $500 off Macs and $250 iPads.  
    
   The new discount program starts in June 2012, and can only be used once every 3 years.
• Apple employees presently are allowed a one-a-year 25% discount on Apple systems. One report even claims that this discount will remain in place alongside the new discounts.

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• The report, published on Wednesday, cited former Apple executives as making comments such as, "We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us."
   
   Another "former Apple executive with direct knowledge of the company's supplier responsibility group" was cited as saying, "If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said another former Apple executive with direct knowledge of the company's supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear."
• Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.
• Earlier this month we opened our supply chain for independent evaluations by the Fair Labor Association.

  • Don't know if this is enough, but Apple is alone at doing this.

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• The New York Times obtained comments posted on the Caixin web site, Weibo.com and other social media in China and translated them.
• • Some might say that Apple should bring the manufacturing to the US increasing the price by 25% or so. No more poor wages, just no wages at all. :)

  • Sounds to me like the best factory job you can get among these electronic makers is at place that manufactures Apple's stuff. But that does not make it a good job.
• "If people saw what kind of life workers lived before they found a job at Foxconn, they would come to an opposite conclusion of this story: that Apple is such a philanthropist,"
• some blaming Apple while many blamed the local government.

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• If you're reading this news article using your O2 mobile phone, you'll be pleased to know that O2 have already sent us your mobile phone number within the HTTP headers which normally contain information about how content can be displayed on your device.
• if you open an e-mail which includes references to external images, the mere action of opening the e-mail would divulge your phone number.
• feature is used by internal O2 websites to identify the user trying to make changes to the account, but that one or more of O2's proxy servers have been misconfigured.

  • since been fixed. How long has this been there?
    Anyway, they really only get our phone number, how useful is that?

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• 802.11ac standard achieves much faster wireless networking speeds than the existing 802.11n specification (in use on the latest Mac, AirPort and iOS devices) by using 2 to 4 times the frequency bandwidth (from 80 to 160MHz), more efficient data transfers through sophisticated modulation, and more antennas (up to 8; existing standards support up to 4, while Apple's Macs currently use up to 3).
• 1 Gigabit (about three times as fast as 802.11n networks can manage), 802.11ac promises better networking range, improved reliability, and more power efficient chips,
• The new 802.11ac isn't expected to be fully approved as a finished standard until late next year, but Apple is poised to adopt it well before then.

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• • I think it makes sense to move the iPhone to later in the year, basically to replace the iPod announcements.
• • 4+ inch display (made by LG on at least one of them).
   
  • No teardrop-shaped devices, as rumored in the lead up to the iPhone 4S. Samples so far have been symmetrical in thickness (also longer/wider).
   
  • Neither of the sample devices have the iPhone 4/4S form factor.

• The concept was revealed this week in a new patent application discovered by AppleInsider. Entitled "Apparatus and Method to Facilitate Universal Remote Control,"
• Apple's proposed solution is a remote control with a dynamic touchscreen used for input. The remote would include a "discovery mechanism" that would discover available appliances for it to control, negating the need for users to enter complex codes and program individual devices.
• • apple will not release a remote for non Apple stuff. Busted I say.
• remote controlling one or more of a television, video players, a stereo, a "smart home" control system, and even a Mac. The document notes that the controller could also be used beyond electronic appliances, and could control programs and functions on a computer, like allowing a user to play songs on iTunes on their Mac or PC.

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• Apple has asked a bankruptcy court to block Kodak from obtaining loans using certain patents as collateral, arguing that it believes the disputed Kodak patents actually belong to Apple.
• In the filing, Apple notes that the dispute involves "pioneering work on digital camera and imaging technology and related hardware, software, and user and communication interfaces" dating back to the early 1990s, when Apple partnered with Kodak "to explore how the two companies could work together on various projects including commercialization of Apple’s digital cameras."
• Apple states that "through this collaboration, Apple disclosed the architecture for its confidential digital camera technology to Kodak subject to various non-disclosure agreements, which also provided that any improvements Kodak made to Apple’s disclosures remain the property of Apple."
• In 1994, Apple released the $749 QuickTake 100, which Time profiled last year as "the first consumer digital camera
• • Also, Apple is saying this patent (take picture while having it on LCD) has been used by Kodak to take to court Sony, JVC, Samsung, LG, RIM, HTC, Fujifilm, and more. They have received £2B already and Apple wants it all.
    
    Kicking them when your down!

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• It cites six patents that were previously used in complaints against older Apple hardware and services.
• The complaint was likely authorized by Google,

• • More on how the company works than just interesting stories.